Modern park for a modern city: planning Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park during the 1960s-1970s

Abstract

Engulfing the Yarkon stream in the northern part of Tel Aviv, the 375-hectares Yarkon Park is the largest public park in Israel and considered as a symbol and a prototype of the modern Israeli park (see Figure 1). Its size is a little larger than Central Park in NewYork and double the size of London’s Hyde Park.The first proposal to establish a green open space on the agricultural lands on the outskirts of town appeared in 1925, when Patrick Geddes, the renowned Scottish planner, prepared the first master plan for Tel Aviv. However, the actual planning of the park and its implementation started only during the 1960s. The expansive pastoral park on both banks of the Yarkon Stream exemplifies two processes of the 1960s that are simultaneously separate and connected. The first is the change of Tel Aviv’s status from ‘The First Hebrew Town’ to Israel’s economic and cultural centre. The second is the adoption of the pastoral park as the prototype of Israel’s large urban parks. Whereas the planning of pre-statehood gardens and parks was part of the national project of creating a Hebrew culture among pre-statehood Zionist settlers in Palestine (1880–1948), the 1960s was when the debate between the local garden culture vs. the Western garden culture was decided in favour of the Western style of garden design and especially the 19 century pastoral park as a symbol of Israeli landscape modernism. This article explores the planning process of Yarkon Park in light of the modern landscape architecture movement in the West and as a modern local icon. It analyses primary sources from private and municipal archives and the documentation of the park in the local general and professional press. The discussion emphasises the role of pastoralism in the making of the Israeli parks.